This site is a work in progress.

The Summa Praedicantium is an alphabetical compendium of materials for preachers, compiled by the Dominican friar John Bromyard in Hereford in the early 14th century. It comprises a prologue and 189 topical chapters, as well as alphabetical indexes (tabula realis and tabula vocalis). This site is an attempt to make the content of the Summa more accessible by turning my old working text (the beginning of a critical edition) into a navigable map of the Summa. It uses a IIIF presentation of the editio princeps to represent the text.¹

Reference system

The Summa was designed to be referenced at the chapter, article and paragraph level. Chapters are coded by the initial of the title and a sequential number: so Misericordia (Mercy), the ninth chapter under “M”, is M.9. Each chapter is divided into a number of numbered articles which are usually listed at the beginning, and also into numbered paragraphs. Paragraphs are numbered sequentially through the whole chapter (i.e. independently of articles) and are the main style of cross-reference used in the work. Articles and paragraphs are findable by marginal numbers; in the printed edition used here they are entered in roman numerals: e.g. “Art. iii” or simply “.xv.” for a paragraph. (In the manuscripts, arabic numerals are used.) To follow a reference to “M.9.11”, you would flip to chapter M.9 and then scan the margins to find the paragraph number “.xi.”. Since the tags float in the margin, their placement varies (sometimes substantially) in the different witnesses; sometimes clearly associated with a paragraph sign in the text, sometimes not. It’s up to the reader to determine where a given paragraph begins and ends.

Elements

IIIF presentation

I have used the IIIF service of the Universitätsbibliothek Basel to present their digitized copy of the editio princeps of the Summa: that of Johannes Amerbach, published in Basel about 1484. I have added chapter-level entries to the original manifest (which contains 1,384 canvases). (I am grateful to the library for publishing the digitized copy under the Public Domain Mark 1.0). I intend to enhance the manifest further with annotations identifying the marginal tags for articles and paragraphs, so that it will be possible to jump directly to a given article or paragraph reference.

Chapter list

The chapter list includes chapter-level links to the Mirador viewer.

Index of sources

The citation index presents an alphabetical list of sources cited by Bromyard, based on notes from my working text. For the chapters in A-C I traced the citations to their sources; for the rest of the Summa I simply entered them from the source text (mostly from the 1586 edition, since I had a print-out of it). The quality of this latter group of citations no doubt leaves much to be desired, due both to the lower quality of the 1586 edition’s text compared to the manuscripts and incunabula, and to the informality of my work in transcribing them.

The citation index is keyed to the chapter and paragraph number. It includes cross-references (under X for “Xref”), so it is possible to find where a paragraph is cited in other paragraphs.

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